For those keeping score, this is the fifth adaptation of the summer blockbuster that I've covered on this blog. Sheesh! You'd think I'd be sick of seeing Flugelheim Museum and the Axis Chemicals Factory by now. The good news is that there is light at the end of the tunnel. I just have to suffer through the Arcade game by Atari. Indeed, it's impossible for me to keep the negative feelings bottled up. This is unfun schlock at its plainest, but you don't have to take my word for it. In the review penned by IndieGameChick, she mentions that only 1,000 units were ever shipped... in 1991. With Bat-mania sweeping the globe, the last thing you'd ever expect to see is an arcade with no Batman game, yet that's exactly what happened here. Atari knew they had a bomb on their hands. They gave up the best-possible release window just to avoid all the negative reviews from critics and arcade-goers alike.
I talk a lot about the video games that feel good to play. How can I not? It's a wondrous sensation that wiggles its way through all my capillaries. A feeling this amazing deserves to be shared with the world. If you're one of those sickos who wonders if I'll ever talk about a product that feels bad to play, then wonder no longer. From second one, Batman moves and fights like everything he does is a context-insensitive action. If you jump when near an enemy, Bats automatically performs a jump-kick, completely ignoring that the reason you jumped was to avoid a bullet. Speaking of jumping, don't even bother trying to jump on reaction to gunfire or thrown knives. Maybe that works in every other game, but not here.
Pretty much every interaction with Joker's goons is clumsy. Bumping into someone knocks Batman back, which is sort-of similar to Shinobi or other arcade titles of that nature. The major issue here is that the hero takes forever to recover, giving other goons an opportunity to fill him full of holes. Dropping onto an enemy from above can take them out. Have fun attempting to land it though. Your angle will be off by a centimeter, resulting in more injury and death. There are more effective means of goon disposal, such as the batarangs and bat-knockout gas pick-ups located throughout each stage. Of the two, you're better off hoarding as much gas as possible. Anything's better than useless punches & kicks, but batarangs can sometimes fail. There's at least one instance where they'll get stuck in a wall the second you throw them. At least with bat-knockout gas, you can just toss it and forget it. Seriously, it's one of the few consistencies this game has.
Then there are the obligatory vehicle sections, where really all you do is try to shoot cars for a minute. The batwing portion does mix things up by having you catch balloons while blowing up helicopters. There's an interesting idea here and it's sort-of functional. I wouldn't use the word fun or any of its synonyms to describe it, but different is always better than the same but worse, which sums up everything else happening onscreen.
Batman the arcade game is unfinished, that's all I have to say. Playing through this was like experiencing every wonky, sloppy, messy, sensation all at the same time. Unlike the worst games, there's none of the mind-blowing absurdity that props my mouth agape and causes me to question all things in life. What's here is just incoherent and lacking any entertainment value. There's always this feeling that I'm trying to punch crooks or trying to leap onto platforms. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works and Batman still ends up a corpse. Oh well.
One of the rumors floating about was that Konami negotiated with Warner Bros. to produce a Batman arcade game. The deal was apparently scuttled when Atari swooped in. I can't get too miffed about ancient history, especially since Konami would get their shot with the franchise in the near future. It's just something else that'll rattle around all the empty space in my skull for the rest of time.
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